Focus to infinity for stars - still blurry?

[NickK]

OP - the on the first image you can see the milky way going from top left to bottom right. Very good first attempt btw

On the focusing - many of the telescope folks have a motorised focuser to first prevent wobble but secondly provide a far far finer focus ability.

Most camera lenses are really fluid in focusing, so you could easy make an audio based focuser and then use a belt over the lens to focus.

 

[Dup]

I don't know Nikon gear but I read yesterday that finding a star in 100% zoom live view and focussing to that can help. I am desperate to get out and try this myself but it's always damn cloudy!

If you have light pollution issues (doesn't seem like it) don't forget to the try the Exposure To The Right tequnique.

This is an alright read:
http://iso.500px.com/basic-astrophotography-tutorial/

 

[CGrieves]

Good shots for a first attempt!

Lots of good advice here. All I can add is that MF scales are sometimes not calibrated well enough to trust, especially as mentioned above the focus shifts with temperature, so with conventional lenses I take a shot of the MF scale with my phone each time I take a group of shots, it's a useful reference for later if conditions are similar.

 

[An Exception]

I had the same issue with a landscape recently. Fairly distant object was blurry when set to infinity. Had to take a pictures at wide aperture and then adjust focus manually until sharp, before stopping the lens back down..

 

[D.P.]

I had the same issue with a landscape recently. Fairly distant object was blurry when set to infinity. Had to take a pictures at wide aperture and then adjust focus manually until sharp, before stopping the lens back down..

Hyperfocal focussing makes this much easier.
Don't focus to infinity but ensure a focus distance and aperture that ensures infinity is in focus.

 

[munge]

So just to move the thread to a next stage, I took the following picture recently of a blood moon lunar eclipse in Queensland, Australia. Never done any night photography so all a bit of experimenting and annoyingly left my extension tube at home, doh! Mkiii with 70-200mm, f 10 10s iso640, 200mm, any slower and I got star trails. Tripod, IS off, remote. Obviously need more zoom but SOOC.

I have a heap of very similar photos I took, so thought Id put them through DeepStarStacker, it took literally a day on a powerful MacBook. Am I using too big a picture file size? The end result appears to be a blank picture....

Any thoughts?